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Wikipedia unveiled new business deals with a slew of artificial intelligence companies on Thursday as it marked its 25th anniversary. The online crowdsourced encyclopedia revealed that it has signed up AI companies, including Amazon, Meta Platforms, Perplexity, Microsoft, and France’s Mistral AI. Wikipedia is one of the last bastions of the early internet, but that original vision of a free online space has been clouded by the dominance of Big Tech platforms and the rise of generative AI chatbots trained on content scraped from the web. Aggressive data collection methods by AI developers, including from Wikipedia’s vast repository of free knowledge, has raised questions about who ultimately pays for the artificial intelligence boom. The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs the site, signed Google as one of its first customers in 2022 and announced other agreements last year with smaller AI players like search engine Ecosia. The new deals will help one of the world’s most popular websites monetize heavy traffic from AI companies. They’re paying to access Wikipedia content at a volume and speed designed specifically for their needs, the foundation said. It did not provide financial or other details. While AI training has sparked legal battles elsewhere over copyright and other issues, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he welcomes it. I’m very happy personally that AI models are training on Wikipedia data because its human curated,” Wales told The Associated Press in an interview. “I wouldnt really want to use an AI thats trained only on X, you know, like a very angry AI, Wales said, referring to billionaire Elon Musk’s social media platform. Wales said the site wants to work with AI companies, not block them. But “you should probably chip in and pay for your fair share of the cost that youre putting on us.” The Wikimedia Foundation last year urged AI developers to pay for access through its enterprise platform and said human traffic had fallen 8%. Meanwhile, visits from bots, sometimes disguised to evade detection, were heavily taxing its servers as they scrape masses of content to feed AI large language models. The findings highlighted shifting online trends as search engine AI overviews and chatbots summarize information instead of sending users to sites by showing them links. Wikipedia is the ninth most visited site on the internet. It has more than 65 million articles in 300 languages that are edited by some 250,000 volunteers. The site has become so popular in part because its free for anyone to use. But our infrastructure is not free, right?” Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander said in a separate interview in Johannesburg, South Africa. It costs money to maintain servers and other infrastructure that allows both individuals and tech companies to draw data from Wikipedia, said Iskander, who’s stepping down on Jan. 20, and will be replaced by Bernadette Meehan. The bulk of Wikipedia’s funding comes from 8 million donors, most of them individuals. They’re not donating in order to subsidize these huge AI companies, Wales said. They’re saying, “You know what, actually you cant just smash our website. You have to sort of come in the right way. Editors and users could benefit from AI in other ways. The Wikimedia Foundation has outlined an AI strategy that Wales said could result in tools that reduce tedious work for editors. While AI isnt good enough to write Wikipedia entries from scratch, it could, for example, be used to update dead links by scanning the surrounding text and then searching online to find other sources. We dont have that yet but thats the kind of thing that I think we will see in the future. Artificial intelligence could also improve the Wikipedia search experience, by evolving from the traditional keyword method to more of a chatbot style, Wales said. You can imagine a world where you can ask the Wikipedia search box a question and it will quote to you from Wikipedia,” he said. It could respond by saying “heres the answer to your question from this article and heres the actual paragraph. That sounds really useful to me and so I think well move in that direction as well. Reflecting on the early days, Wales said it was a thrilling time because many people were motivated to help build Wikipedia after he and co-founder Larry Sanger, who departed long ago, set it up as an experiment. However, while some might look back wistfully on what seems now to be a more innocent time, Wales said those early days of the internet also had a dark side. People were pretty toxic back then as well. We didnt need algorithms to be mean to each other, he said. But, you know, it was a time of great excitement and a real spirit of possibility. Wikipedia has lately found itself under fire from figures on the political right, who have dubbed the site Wokepedia and accused it of being biased in favor of the left. Republican lawmakers in the U.S. Congress are investigating alleged manipulation efforts in Wikipedias editing process that they said could inject bias and undermine neutral points of view on its platform and the AI systems that rely on it. A notable source of criticism is Musk, who last year launched his own AI-powered rival, Grokipedia. He has criticized Wikipedia for being filled with propaganda and urged people to stop donating to the site. Wales said he doesn’t consider Grokipedia a real threat to Wikipedia because it’s based on large language models, which are the troves of online text that AI systems are trained on. Large language models arent good enough to write really quality reference material. So a lot of it is just regurgitated Wikipedia, he said. It often is quite rambling and sort of talks nonsense. And I think the more obscure topic you look into, the worse it is. He stressed that he wasn’t singling out criticism of Grokipedia. Its just the way large language models work. Wales say he’s known Musk for years but they haven’t been in touch since Grokipedia launched. I should probably ping him, Wales said. What would he say? ’Hows your family?’ Im a nice person, I dont really want to pick a fight with anybody. Kelvin Chan, AP business writer AP writer Mogomotsi Magome contributed to this report
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E-Commerce
If you are Verizon customer, like me, you’ve probably been scrambling to make phone calls, send texts, and get online since Wednesday, due to a massive, nationwide service outage. (I am writing this from my local food co-op outside Boston, where I am using the internet in their cafe.) The mobile giant says the issue has now been resolved, however, some customers are saying they’re still without service. Some 1.5 million users reported the prolonged outage on Downdetector, which still had some 893 reports (as of around 2:30 p.m. ET). That’s over 24 hours after customers first started losing service around noon ET on Wednesday, with iPhone users reporting an SOS icon, as Fast Company reported. This live map on Downdetector reports continued outages in Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Tampa, Dallas, and Houston (as of this writing at around 3 p.m. ET). To its credit (literally), Verizon has said it will contact customers and provide them with a $20 credit for the inconvenience. Posting on X, the mobile company wrote on Thursday: “Yesterday, we did not meet the standard of excellence you expect and that we expect of ourselves. To help provide some relief to those affected, we will give you a $20 account credit that can be easily redeemed by logging into the myVerizon app.” How can I get the $20 Verizon credit for the outage? According to the post, customers will receive a text message when the credit is available. However, the credit will not be automatically applied to customers’ accounts, and customers must redeem it through the myVerizon app. Additionally, the credit can also be redeemed by contacting Verizon customer service through phone, chat, or online, according to reporting from Engadget. “On average, this covers multiple days of service. Business customers will be contacted directly about their credits,” the company explained. “This credit isnt meant to make up for what happened. No credit really can. But its a way of acknowledging your time and showing that this matters to us.” Still having trouble connecting? Verizon suggests the following: “please restart your device (power down and power back on). This is the fastest way to reconnect your phone to the network.”
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E-Commerce
The president was barely a year into his administration when a health care debate began to consume Washington. On Capitol Hill, partisan divides formed as many Democrats pressed for guaranteed insurance coverage for a broader swath of Americans while Republicans, buttressed by medical industry lobbying, warned about cost and a slide into communism. The year was 1945 and the new Democratic president, Harry Truman, tried and failed to persuade Congress to enact a comprehensive national health care program, a defeat Truman described as the disappointment of his presidency that troubled me the most. Since then, 13 presidents have struggled with the same basic questions about the governments role in health care, where spending now makes up nearly 18% of the U.S. economy. The fraught politics of health care are on display again this month as millions of people face a steep rise in costs after the Republican-controlled Congress allowed Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire. While the subsidies are a narrow, if costly, slice of the issue, they have reopened long-festering grievances in Washington over the way health care is managed and the legacy of the ACA, the signature legislative achievement of President Barack Obama that was passed in 2010 without a single Republican vote. That’s the key thing that I’ve got to convince my colleagues to understand who hate Obamacare, said Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, who is leading a bipartisan group of lawmakers discussing ways to extend some of the subsidies. Let’s take two years to actually deliver for the American people truly affordable health care. Democrats have heard that refrain before, and argue Republicans have had 15 years to offer an alternative. They believe the options being discussed now, which largely focus on allowing Americans to funnel money to health savings accounts, do little to address the cost of health care. They’ve had a lot of time, said Rep. Steny Hoyer, the Maryland Democrat who was House majority leader during the ACA debate. And with that, welcome back to the health care debate that never seems to end. The challenge of reaching consensus The often-tortured dynamics surrounding health care have remained remarkably consistent. Obamacare dramatically expanded coverage but remains even in the minds of those who crafted the law imperfect and more expensive than many would prefer. And Washington seems more entrenched in stalemate rather than marching toward a solution. People hate the status quo but theyre not too thrilled with change, Rahm Emanuel said as he reflected on the arc of the health care debate that he has watched as a top aide to President Bill Clinton, chief of staff to Obama, and Chicago mayor. Thats the riddle to the politics of health care. Major reforms inevitably run into a health industry a broad group of interests ranging from pharmaceutical and health services companies to hospitals and nursing homes that spent more than $653 million on lobbying in 2025, according to OpenSecrets, which tracks political spending. Any time you try to figure out how to bring costs down, somebody thinks uh oh, Im about to get less, said Hoyer, who announced last week he will not seek reelection after serving since 1981. When Obamacare was passed, opinion on the law was mixed, although views tended to be more positive than negative, according to KFF polling. But the law has steadily grown in popularity. A KFF poll conducted in September 2025 found that about two-thirds of Americans have a favorable view of the ACA. That’s put Trump and Republicans in a bind. Trump’s concepts of a plan Since the ACA’s passage, Republicans largely dedicated themselves to the law’s destruction. Trump issued social media posts calling for a repeal as early as 2011 and spoke in generalities during each of his presidential campaigns about delivering better coverage at lower cost. During his 2024 debate against Democratic rival Kamala Harris, he referred to concepts of a plan. One thing he hasn’t done offer his own formal proposal. During a speech to the Detroit Economic Club on Tuesday, Trump said he would soon announce a health care affordability framework. Throughout his second term, Trump has criticized Obamacare as unfairly subsidizing insurers, a point that could have been addressed had the legislation created a so-called public option that would have competed alongside the private sector. Republicans and a sizable number of Democrats objected to that approach, arguing it would give the government an outsize role in health care. But in a reminder that the past is never really over, a small group of Democrats is aiming to revive the debate over the public option, even if the prospects in a Republican-controlled Congress are dim. Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, along with Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, introduced legislation last week that would create a public health insurance option on the ACA exchanges. Last year, a record 24 million people were enrolled in ACA, though fewer appear to be signing up this year as the expired subsidies make coverage more expensive. The Supreme Court has upheld the law and Republicans have failed to repeal, replace, or alter it dozens of times. In the most famous example, Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, cast the deciding vote in 2018 to keep the legislation in place, underscoring the lack of an alternative by noting there was no replacement to actually reform our health care system and deliver affordable, quality health care to our citizens. Democrats successfully turned the repeal efforts into a rallying cry in the 2018 midterms and see an opportunity to do so again this year with the expired subsidies. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who isn’t seeking reelection, has warned this moment could be even more perilous for Republicans because, unlike the subsidies, voters didnt lose anything during the 2018 debate. Us failing to put something else in place did not create this cliff, Tillis said. Thats the fundamental difference in an election year. ACA veterans acknowledge challenges Even those who crafted the ACA concede that the health care system created in its wake has problems. Former Se. Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat who was one of the bill’s architects as chair of the Finance committee, acknowledged that nothing is perfect, pointing to high health care costs. Bending the cost curve, that has not bent as much as we’d like, he said. That’s in part why some Republicans have expressed openness to a deal on the subsidies. They see it less as an endorsement of ACA than a bridge that would give lawmakers time to address more complex issues. We need to get to a long-term solution, said Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb. Veterans of past health care negotiations, however, are skeptical that lawmakers can produce anything meaningful without the type of in-depth negotiations that led up to the ACA. It takes a long time to figure all this out, Baucus said. Asked whether he’s studied that history as he dives into the next chapter of health care talks, Moreno noted that he’s only been in Congress for a year. I don’t know s-, he said. What that means is I don’t have scars. By Steven Sloan, Associated Press Associated Press writer Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux contributed to this report.
Category:
E-Commerce
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